President Trump's Middle East policy is simple: Back our friends and scare the hell out of our enemies, and negotiate where possible with our competitors like Russia and China. By and large it's working, unlike the catastrophically failed polices of the previous two administrations. Trump did what he said he would do and succeeded. You wouldn't know that from the #fakenews media.
There was a time when it might have been appropriate to vote for an honorable person as a representative, and trust that he would do the right thing for me and my country.Now, the logic is reversed.I evaluate if he or she will do the right thing, i.e., not vote for policies that will continue and accelerate the destruction of our civilization, and trust that he (or now, she) will be honorable.If he or she is not honorable, I will work to replace him or her with someone who is. I will never vote for anyone, however honorable, who is on the wrong side of our civilization.That's why I voted for Trump (after my favorite Cruz lost in the primaries), and that's why I would vote for Moore if I lived in Alabama.Moore is very unlikely to vote for policies that I disfavor, and has essentially zero chance of fondling anybody I care about (assuming for the purposes of this discussion that he is as guilty as we know that Bill C., John K., Ted K., and numerous other Democrats are and were).
Advancing the Democratic Party’s new-found McCarthyism over the theme of “Russian Collusion,” Sen. Al Franken authored an op-ed piece in the Guardian last week asking for government censorship over Internet media content giants Google, Facebook and Twitter.
During the presidential election, there was a lot of talk about Hillary Clinton’s health. The mainstream media insisted that she was just fine, and they accused those of us in the alternative media that were questioning her health of engaging in “propaganda” and “misinformation”. Well, it turns out that we now know that Clinton’s health was so bad that Donna Brazile was actually considering replacing the nominee, and so it was actually the mainstream media that was putting out “propaganda” and “misinformation.”
Democrats pushing the Trump collusion investigation learned to their dismay that they too had a Russia problem. "NBC reports that Tony Podesta (the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta) and his firm are the subjects of a criminal investigation by the special prosecutor. ... The Podesta probe concerns suggestions he failed to fully disclose spending (a felony) while lobbying for a pro-Russian Ukrainian group."This was unforeseen. Nor did they realize that none the compartments of the great global world were watertight. Within days of being berated by Senator Diane Feinstein for not doing enough to stop Putin's meddling in elections Silicon Valley had a Russia problem too. The New York Times today reported that Putin secretly bought a large stake in the social media companies through a dummy. Leaked documents from a Bermuda law firm reveal "that a state-controlled bank in Moscow helped to fuel Yuri Milner’s ascent in Silicon Valley, where the Russia investigation has put tech companies under scrutiny".Behind Mr. Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter were hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin. Obscured by a maze of offshore shell companies, the Twitter investment was backed by VTB, a Russian state-controlled bank often used for politically strategic deals. And a big investor in Mr. Milner’s Facebook deal received financing from Gazprom Investholding, another government-controlled financial institution, according to the documents. ... Ultimately, Mr. Milner’s companies came to own more than 8 percent of Facebook and 5 percent of Twitter, helping earn him a place on various lists of the world’s most powerful business people.
Still it may be profitable in real-life Washington to go back a few years, as Dana Priest in the New Yorker does, to unravel a problem similar to that which baffled Sherlock: why did the dog not bark in the night? Or as Priest puts it,why couldn't the Obama era intelligence community detect Russian meddling.
And then, of course we have the famous Romney - Obama debate in which Obama chides Romney “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because you know, the Cold War has been over for 20 years."There are too many coincidences for it to be just bad luck. Some journalists are belatedly realizing they are living through the aftermath of the Big Bang. A huge strike happened without them even being aware of it and the scale of it is boggling. The Obama administration failed to detect the rise of the Islamic state, was surprised by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Putin's intervention in Syria, did not see the rapid development of Kim's nuclear arsenal and, publicly at least, ascribed the assault on the Benghazi consulate to a video -- and as the New Yorker points out, were even blindsided by Russian election interference openly happening on Facebook.
"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help" was the usual warning. But somewhere along the line conventional wisdom discarded this injunction and media began to create the myth that there were special people to rule over us. Celebrities. A cultural elite. Role models. The only adults in the room. The smartest woman in the world. As social media exposes celebrity after celebrity as flawed we are relearning just how fragile that foundation is.
... call for Roy Moore to drop out of the Alabama race because "there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on standards"
... an uncomfortable statistical fact, once widely accepted and prosaically expressed as 'all men are sinners'. Moore may or may not be guilty of sexual indiscretion, but the possibility is not excluded in principle. An earlier generation could probably quote 1 John 1:8 "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" to remind themselves of this. Alternatively they might cite James Madison.what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Things are completely different when a political movement bases virtue on a particular class of human beings. The danger is particularly acute in Marxism which boldly declares in the Manifesto that "Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis". There being no God only institutions raises the stakes for institutions. If the Party, the Vanguard of humanity and the source of virtue is found to have a sinner, or worse yet found to be chock full of sinners, guilt is not merely individual but collective. The whole basis collapses. Unlike God who remains unsullied "out there", the practical effect of vice is to undermine the Party's actual legitimacy.
The scandals rocking Hollywood, the political elite and the media are qualitatively different from any scandal that could embroil a conservative because latter was always just a man while the former were special men who stood as judges of all mankind able to nudge or signal virtue as the arc of history bade them do.Now, so the joke goes, they are all being spliced out of movies by the octogenarian Christopher Plummer because it turns out they are no better than anyone else. Being 'like everybody else' is the ultimate downer for any aspiring ruler. A ruler may be anything except ordinary and it's just the trouble when they aren't.
Fourteen days before President Trump took the oath of office, the Obama administration’s intelligence chiefs made public a unanimous assessment claiming Russian operatives, under orders from President Vladimir Putin, had orchestrated an influence campaign to help Mr. Trump win the presidential contest.It was a watershed moment: the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI challenging the legitimacy of a U.S. presidential victory.The conclusions in the Jan. 6 document were sharp, but the findings unraveled 10 months later, raising questions about the basis for the evidence and the motives of the Obama appointees leading the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.“It left me scratching my head,” said one intelligence source with personal access to former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and former CIA Director John O. Brennan, two of the men who had signed off on the assessment.
Peggy Noonan’s observation in the Wall Street Journal that the most recent jihadist mass murderer is “an idiot”—unlike the men who perpetrated 9/11, but like all who have struck us since—provokes more thought than likely went into it.
Noonan correctly notes that 9/11 led us to expect more attacks with comparable planning and execution. Instead, we’ve been hit by random idiots, the most sophisticated of whom (the Bataclan murderers) operate at an elementary infantry level.
So what? Our ruling class concludes that more and better policing has precluded attacks on the scale of 9/11, limiting Islamist terrorism to a level with which we can live. But this lumping of terrorism into a single category misunderstands how very different 9/11 was from what has followed—different kinds of perpetrators, different bases of support, a different relationship with Islamism, and different in the dangers they comport for us. Hence they misunderstand what military and police action can accomplish.
Focusing on these differences—especially in the light of the recently released Osama Bin Laden documents and their emphasis on al-Qaeda’s latter-day relationship with Iran—invites us to cut through the establishment’s parrot-chorus of “what everyone knows” about terrorism and to unravel the complexity what we are really up against. The following is the first of a four-part attempt to do this.
Far from idiots or zealous amateurs working from Afghan caves, the men who planned and ran the 9/11 attack forged passports, and used the international banking system, sophisticated intelligence, and logistics. With the sole exception of Mohammed Atta, they did not expose themselves to danger. So good was their security that, to this day, we do not know who most of the hijackers were: The names on the passports they used to board did not match the security camera photos and, whereas Atta sent the remainder of the money from the plot to an account linked to Bin Laden—openly—the world’s banking sleuths have been unable to determine from which accounts the money had come.
Wiping out records of money transfers is akin in sophistication to producing and altering passports—the kinds of things done not in Afghan caves, but by sovereign countries’ intelligence services. Though we don’t know who provided the passports with which most of the 9/11 hijackers came to America, we know that Saddam’s Iraq provided the ones with which Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Rahman Yasin came to America for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that the crew who organized 1993 ran 9/11 as well. We know that, unlike the “idiots” who have hit us since, these people had no history of Muslim devotion. They were professionals, with the resources of sovereign countries’ intelligence services.
The billions of dollars in barbed wire, badges, intelligence, and policing inflicted upon America since 9/11 have neither prevented nor thwarted any plans to attack the United States with the sophistication and on the scale of 9/11. The primordial fact is, no one has tried.
The Muslim world’s states and terrorists have always lived symbiotically. Because mobilizing for full-scale war exposes these states’ congenital internal fragility, they have always fought through proxy groups. Hence, willful ignorance has been required for the American ruling class to maintain the fiction that terrorist groups are independent. That fiction has served our ruling class’s ideological predilections and has provided terrorists the sine qua non for their operations. That is why the Bin Laden papers’ discussion of al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran (about which more in another article) is such a valuable reminder of reality.
The workshop, titled "What What in the Butt: Anal 101," was part of Sex Week at Harvard,
Rep. Brenda Lawrence thinks Congress needs to do something about sexual harassment following all that has occurred following Harvey Weinstein's fall from grace. It's the typical knee-jerk reaction from a politician who feels it's imperative to be seen taking action.One problem, though. Several women have voiced complaints about her own chief of staff, according to a report at Politico. Lawrence reportedly has taken no action on this alleged harassment in her own office.Three women who used to work for Lawrence claim they told the congresswoman directly about how they had been treated by Dwayne Duron Marshall. Two explicitly stated that his inappropriate comments and physical contact were the reasons they left their jobs there.Despite the complaints, Marshall still works for the Democrat from Michigan.
Fourteen days before President Trump took the oath of office, the Obama administration’s intelligence chiefs made public a unanimous assessment claiming Russian operatives, under orders from President Vladimir Putin, had orchestrated an influence campaign to help Mr. Trump win the presidential contest.It was a watershed moment: the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI challenging the legitimacy of a U.S. presidential victory.The conclusions in the Jan. 6 document were sharp, but the findings unraveled 10 months later, raising questions about the basis for the evidence and the motives of the Obama appointees leading the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.“It left me scratching my head,” said one intelligence source with personal access to former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and former CIA Director John O. Brennan, two of the men who had signed off on the assessment.The 15-page document presented to the president-elect at Trump Tower in Manhattan was mostly filler — a republication of a years-old CIA analysis of the Kremlin’s global television network Russia Today. A mere five pages were dedicated to charge that Moscow blended cyberhacking with state-backed propaganda and social media trolls to defeat Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.There was no supporting documentation of how America’s top spies arrived at the brazen conclusion that Russians had “gained access to” and “exfiltrated large volumes of data” from Democratic National Committee computers, an explosive claim that sent shock waves across the U.S. political and intelligence landscapes.The five pages of the report have hung over Mr. Trump’s presidency ever since, hurting his credibility abroad and at home and shaping the narrative of five ongoing federal and congressional investigations into suspected Russian meddling, even though the document’s core conclusion looks increasingly weak in hindsight. Both Democrats and Republicans now say that Russian efforts were intended not to elect Mr. Trump but to sow chaos in American politics no matter who emerged as the victor.
After an unidentified troll wrote the threatening words "Go home n----r" on dormitory message boards at the Air Force Academy prep school in September, Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, the academy's superintendent, delivered a blistering speech on tolerance. With 4,000 students standing at attention, he said, "If you demean someone in any way, you need to get out."
The speech went viral, garnering more than 2 million views on YouTube.
Now the academy says one of the five African-American cadet candidates thought to be a victim was actually the perpetrator. The student is no longer enrolled, school officials said Tuesday.
The prep school, which offers a year of training for academy prospects who need academic help, wouldn't offer details on the circumstances surrounding the hoax. But The (Colorado Springs) Gazette, citing anonymous sources, reported that the unidentified student wrote the messages "in a bizarre bid to get out of trouble he faced at the school for other misconduct."
Why does someone write a real bit of hate-graffiti? For these reasons:1. To threaten/worry a racial minority.2. To stir up racial divisions.3. To encourage others to express their own racial hatreds (for minorities).Now, why does a member of a minority group write hate-graffiti?1. To threaten/worry a racial minority.2. To stir up racial divisions.3. To encourage others to express their own racial hatreds (for the group presumed responsible for the graffiti, usually straight white Christian men).Now, notice that in both cases, the motivations and the intent and the act and even the very words used are precisely the same.So why is the same sort of hatred written by a white person treated a hate crime -- all prosecutorial tools deployed, minor crimes like vandalism pushed to the hilt, even possible charges of intent to make terroristic threats added -- and the hate graffiti, when written by a not-white, though with the exact same intentions of making minorities fear for their safety, stirring up racial divisions, and directing hatred and contempt at one racial group -- treated as mere mischief?
This is not a hoax -- this is a hate-crime, or, more accurately, malicious vandalism with the sentencing intensifier of being committed with the intent to spread fear and hatred, just as it would be if a white guy did it.The fact that a non-white did it does not change those facts -- and neither should it change the criminal penalty nor the social opprobrium heaped on the miscreant who did it, unless our nation is prepared to officially declare, unconstutionally but with the authority of Spike Lee, that non-whites are incapable of racism and hence any laws regarding racialized crime apply only to one race.This is not a hoax. This is a hate crime, just committed by a black kid.Prosecute him like you would a white malefactor, or confess that only white people are targeted by laws which are claimed to be race-neutral when it comes to Supreme Court review.The fact that these minority race-criminals are permitted, without any sanction beyond a slap on the wrist, to write hate-messages to terrorize their fellow minorities to direct hate against white people is why we have so much of this.Do liberals think this is helping heal the racial divide by encouraging minorities to spread #FalseFlag racial slurs? Does that reduce the racial tension minorities feel? Does that reduce the racial tension that whites/men/straights/Christians -- the usual targets of these #FaleFlag hate crimes -- feel?I encourage any conservative leaning news organization to FOIA the information on this particular race criminal.It's time to stop pretending these things are just some "understandable mischief" when committed by a minority. It's time to stop with the condescending racism pushed on us by progressives that anyone who's not white, male, straight and Christian had no moral agency and no ability to restrain himself from committing evil acts.It's time to start applying the law equally to all races.Crazy idea, huh?
Like it or not, Donald Trump in fits and starts has chosen not to accommodate the progressive vision. But in most unlikely fashion he leads the fight against it.
Those who found him too crude, who saw his tweets as too adolescent, and who vowed never to vote for such an antithesis of conservative and family values have all weighed in.
So have those who are embarrassed that Trump—as did Obama during the Henry Louis Gates fiasco, the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, and the Ferguson shooting and subsequent riots—quite inappropriately weighs in on current criminal investigations and trials.
And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.
The Age of Intolerance
We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.
There are few Berkeley-like free speech areas on college campuses any more. Students charged with particular crimes enjoy little due process. There is no Joan Baez-style acknowledgement of the tragedy of good Southern poor men fighting for an awful cause. No one acknowledges tragedy anywhere at all; it has all become melodrama. We may yet see Joan Baez’s version of The Band’s ballad or Shelby Foote’s commentaries in Ken Burn’s epic Civil War documentary Trotskyized.
The media is not disinterested. Networks such as CNN see their role actively on the barricades, devoted to the higher cause of destroying the Trump presidency, not as reporting its successes or failures. The danger to free expression and a free media is not even Trumpian bombast. It is the far more deliberate and insidious transformation (begun in full under Obama) of journalism into a progressive ministry of truth. Even if he wished, Trump could not take away what the professional press already surrendered voluntarily.
The Cultural Abyss
After the nocturnal effort to tear down historic statuary, the NFL player psychodramas, the therapeutic reactions to radical Islamic terror attacks inside the United States, and the often unhinged profanity and assassination chic of the anti-Trump “Resistance,” Trump almost alone seems to sound off in opposition.
On one side are traditionalists who believe the United States is the most exceptional nation of a uniquely self-critical West. They believe that we need not be perfect, past or present, to be good and certainly are and were always far better than the alternative. And while reform and protest may be innate to the American character, traditions and values of the past simply cannot be airbrushed away because a particular generation suddenly believes that the dead of a far more hazardous and impoverished age must meet their own transitory mores of the present. Oddly, few of the Republican establishment speak out for them.
The new progressive Left believes that America has always been defined by its collective sins, which outweigh those of other cultures. They identify the white heterosexual male as the font of most pathologies (cf. the Democratic National Committee’s unapologetic effort not to hire white males for some of its jobs). Like it or not, Trump is now a central figure in resisting a full-scale dismantling of the idea of the uniquely individual, free, and outspoken American.
The world's most profitable firm has a secretive new structure that would enable it to continue avoiding billions in taxes, the Paradise Papers show.They reveal how Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its controversial Irish tax practices by actively shopping around for a tax haven.It then moved the firm holding most of its untaxed offshore cash, now $252bn, to the Channel Island of Jersey.Up until 2014, the tech company had been exploiting a loophole in tax laws in the US and the Republic of Ireland known as the "double Irish".This allowed Apple to funnel all its sales outside of the Americas - currently about 55% of its revenue - through Irish subsidiaries that were effectively stateless for taxation purposes, and so incurred hardly any tax.Instead of paying Irish corporation tax of 12.5%, or the US rate of 35%, Apple's avoidance structure helped it reduce its tax rate on profits outside of the US to the extent that its foreign tax payments rarely amounted to more than 5% of its foreign profits, and in some years dipped below 2%.The European Commission calculated the rate of tax for one of Apple's Irish companies for one year had been just 0.005%.
It's always important to understand how you know what you know, or what you think you know. It's particularly important in the case of the Trump dossier.Consider the increasing number of claims that the incendiary allegations of the dossier "check out," in the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens...."What's relevant is [Steele's] credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims," Stephens wrote recently. "These check out."But do they? In reality, most reasonable people not named Mueller would have to say we don't know."As it relates to the Steele dossier, unfortunately the committee has hit a wall," Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr noted last month. The committee's investigation, the best probe outside of the Mueller special prosecutor operation, has not even been able to discover who Steele's sources were, Burr said.So how do outsiders conclude that the document's key allegations check out? How do they know what they know?...Voila: Isikoff reported, accurately, U.S. intelligence agencies received intelligence reports on Page's trip. The alleged actions involving Page that Isikoff reported -- attributed to a "Western intelligence source," which was some reporters' shorthand for the former British spy -- lined up precisely with the contents of Steele's dossier. (Even John Sipher conceded that, "Admittedly, Isikoff's reporting may have relied on Steele himself for that information.")Given all that, Stephens' point that the dossier "checks out" is basically saying the dossier proves the dossier.
What we know to be western liberal democracy, assumes certain things about humanity to be true all the time. The blank slate is the most obvious example. Everything about our politics and culture assumes that humans are infinitely malleable. From school policy to prison reform, public policy is based on the assumption that people can be whatever they choose, because they have free will and a blank slate that can be erased and re-illustrated at any point in their life. You are what you make of yourself.It’s how our rulers arrived at the idea of importing millions of foreigners. Those foreigners can be re-purposed into tax paying westerners, through education and enculturation, to pay the pensions of the native stock. Those Somali goatherds can be plopped down into Minnesota and over time, develop all of the habits of the average Minnesotan, just by emulation and proximity. Race laws are all based on the assumption that you can train people to stop noticing racial difference and therefore, end racism.....It seems today that Western societies are painfully re-learning things that were common knowledge a few generations ago. The old axiom, fences make good neighbors, was replaced with “diversity is our strength.” Every time a swarthy fellow blows up in the public square, we inch a bit closer to the realization that diversity is a nightmare. That’s the part we see. The part we don’t see, at least not yet, is the crumbling of the foundation stones of the modern West. That foundation of nonsense is giving way to biological reality.
